Sony VAIO VGX-TP25E Home Theater PC review:

Sony VAIO VGX-TP25E Home Theater PC

Sony VAIO VGX-TP25E Home Theater PC

The Sony VAIO VGX-TP25E Home Theater PC's looks and features may draw you in, but considering its price and what it lacks, we hope you'll turn away. Other vendors systems offer similar capabilities, but for much less money.

The BadMassively overpriced; no 802.11n Wi-Fi; hard drive will fill up quickly with recorded HD; no way to get inside to upgrade the hard drive.

The Bottom LineYou might be drawn in by the VAIO TP25's looks and features, but considering both its price and what it lacks, we hope you'll turn away. Other vendors offer similar capabilities for much less, and Sony charges way too much for this system's few advantages.

CNET Editors' Rating

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As much as we find Sony's $3,000 VAIO TP25 Home Theater PC overpriced, this premium model actually has better bang-for-the-buck than the VAIO TP1 it replaces. Thanks to a beefy processor and more memory, the TP25 delivers respectable performance for a $3,000 PC built with laptop components. Unfortunately, we don't think many people in the market for a living room desktop are after raw processing power. Instead, features rule the day in this kind of PC, and while the TP25 has some of the right boxes checked, its pricing remains out of whack compared with similar products on the market.

We review the VAIO TP25 under the assumption that Sony intends for you to connect it to a large display, most likely a television in your living room. You could certainly use it for a desktop, or connect it to a smaller display in a dorm or a den (perhaps a more likely alternative), but considering its high-end, HD-oriented features, it seems most likely that you'd use the TP25 from your couch.

So what of those features? The highlights include a read-only Blu-ray drive, an HDMI video output, and two bundled ATI Digital Cable Tuners (in other words, CableCard support). The Blu-ray player in particular is a welcome addition. The TP1 was standard definition only, and although at $1,600 it was less expensive than the TP25, it seemed counterintuitive that any Sony-made media PC would lack a Blu-ray drive.

Even though the TP25 comes Blu-ray equipped, we'd like to see more here than Sony has to offer. For comparison, we'll offer up HP's Pavilion SlimLine s3200t.

Sony VAIO TP25 Home Theater PC

HP Pavilion SlimLine s3200t

Price

$2,999

$1,540

CPU

2.1GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T8100

2.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo E4500

Memory

4GB 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM

2GB 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM

Graphics

256MB Nvidia GeForce 8400M GT

256MB Nvidia GeForce 8500 GT

Hard drives

500GB, 7,200 rpm

500GB 7,200 rpm

Optical drive

Blu-ray player/DVD-burner

Blu-Ray/HD DVD player with LightScribe DVD burner

Networking

802.11b/g wireless, Gigabit Ethernet

802.11b/g wireless, Gigabit Ethernet

TV Tuner

(2) ATI Digital Cable Tuner

Integrated ATSC/NTSC tuner

Operating system

Windows Vista Home Premium

Windows Vista Home Premium

The performance charts below show that the VAIO TP25's higher-end laptop CPU and extra memory pay off in speed, but we'll argue that raw speed is not the primary consideration here. The slower HP still plays Blu-ray movies smoothly, and if the HP can do that, it's not that crazy to suggest that it doesn't need the processing power to do much more, given that it's meant for the living room.

There's more to the Sony VAIO TP25 than just its Blu-ray capability, though. Although using the two ATI Digital Cable tuners will require installation and a separate monthly cable plan, they will let you both watch and record HD digital cable on the TP25. CableCard-based TV service is not available everywhere yet, but if you do have access and can establish a reliable signal, CableCard can provide you with the most advanced, highest-quality TV-to-PC experience around.

It is not, however, worth an extra $1,400 for the privilege. Herein lies our biggest problem with the VAIO TP25. The TP25 costs $2,999. For $1,599 you can get the VAIO TP20, a white model of the same system, but with no CableCard tuners and only 2GB of RAM. Those are the only differences. To compare, Dell charges $300 to add two ATI Digital Cable Tuners to its XPS 420 desktop. To add 2GB of 667MHz to a Dell notebook costs you $300. For both of those upgrades, which together cost about $650 from Dell, Sony asks you to pay $1,400 if you opt for the TP25 over the TP20, or more than double.

There's worse news for Sony. HP offers the Pavilion Slimline s3330f, an update to the S3200t, which will net you a small PC with a Blu-ray/HD DVD combo drive for $949.